Chapter 60 Aurelia #2
He inhaled, and the cage inhaled with him. Exhaled, and the bars bowed outward. “Everything will be mine,” he said softly. “Even the laws that swore to stand beyond my reach.”
The words struck colder as the prophecy crawled back to me—script I’d once traced into memory: “Balance cannot be ruled. Balance cannot be kept.” My blood had been called balance—unruly, ungoverned, the one thing not meant to bend.
But blood isn’t one's own once it’s shared.
And Kaelith carried mine now. Whatever was promised of me, whatever storms were meant to rise in my veins, he had stolen a taste of it.
If balance could not be ruled, then neither could he.
The square held its breath. Even the gulls went mute, slipping the wind without a cry.
“Malachi,” Kaelith said, as if resuming a conversation. His eyes did not leave mine. “Tell me—did you do as I asked?”
A stillness fell over Malachi at the sound of his name.
I felt the world narrow to the point of his question. Malachi stepped half a pace forward, close enough that his shadow touched Kaelith’s boots. His shoulders were set in the old soldier’s brace, jaw locked, eyes bright with that terrible gold.
“Her power has started to manifest,” he said. His voice was even, stripped of the softer edges it had held in the dark. “She carries the mark of all four—water, root, flame, night. It emerged under duress.”
“Mm.” Kaelith’s mouth curved. “And how did it emerge?”
Malachi didn’t glance at me. “I was… stabbed.”
“Ah.” Kaelith’s smile sharpened. “And she got upset. Emotion-driven. Of course.” His attention slid across me like a blade across whetstone. “What did it look like?”
Heat crawled up my neck. The crowd pressed closer. I felt their listening like prying fingertips. “Malachi.” I meant it to come out as a warning, but even in my own mouth it felt more like a question I didn’t want answered.
His gaze stayed on Kaelith. “She bends fire. She binds shadow. She can use them together. I suspect the mark awoke more than we’ve yet seen. Her body heals fast. Faster each time.”
“Very good,” Kaelith crooned, enjoying himself. “Did you fuck her?”
The ground tilted. I tasted iron.
For a heartbeat Malachi didn’t answer. Then, flat: “Yes.”
He looked away as if to scan the crowd. For a sliver of a moment, I caught his face before it shuttered. Something raw flickered there, satisfaction or regret, gone too fast to name.
It knifed through me. Humiliation flooded hot, my face burning as if the whole square had watched me unravel. Trust, fragile as spun glass, split down the center. Had he been using me from the start? A pawn to maneuver, a body to claim, a mask to wear when it suited him?
The urge to lash out surged—fist, blade, anything to make him bleed truth instead of poison. But all I could do was choke it down, the fracture widening with every breath.
I hadn’t noticed Hayat shift to my side, his hand pressed against my back, a touch that made room for collapse. But I would not collapse. Not here. Even with my eyes burning and the threat of tears rising, I locked it down. I would not be weak.
“Good. I missed the show, but eternity is generous. There will be others.” Kaelith said, almost bored. “Bind her. We’ll be heading back now.”
“Don’t—” Hayat started, stepping in front of me, Kaerani’s mark burning bright at his neck.
Malachi’s shadow moved before his body did—a monster loosed. His shadow threw itself at Hayat, hit him square in the chest like a wave, and sent him skidding across the stones. Hayat rolled, came up in a crouch, teeth bared, blood fresh at his brow where it had kissed the stone.
“Malachi,” Lysara gasped, voice cracking. She looked at him as if he’d struck her instead of Hayat, and the grief in her face split something in me I didn’t know could still break.
Santiago’s curse burned the air: “You bastard—” His hand shot out, fingers curling as if to grab Malachi by the throat from across the stones.
Power answered, light flaring sharp and sudden.
The cobbles at Santiago’s feet cracked, hairline fractures racing outward as if the ground itself wanted to lunge with him.
Gabriel’s hand found mine, a squeeze that carried both promise and parting. Then he folded into darkness, his form dissolving to smoke.
Shadows curled from Malachi’s hands, smooth as silk, cold as iron taken from snow. They reached for me, hesitating only a breath before wrapping my wrists, my ribs, my throat. Tight enough to bruise.
I fought them on instinct. Fire rose to my palm, hot and eager. Water gathered under my tongue like a held mouthful. The taste of leaves and loam bloomed in my lungs, and shadows whispered at my spine—
“None of that now,” Kaelith murmured, mild as a tutor chiding a child. The bond at my throat thrummed; pain lanced my temple. My power guttered, flaring back at me, leaving only a scorch at my palm and the copper taste of thwarted magic.
“Aeryn!” I called, raw. He stood two steps above the altar, pupils blown wide as dark coins.
His fingers worried the seam of the fabric as if he were trying to worry a thought free.
He looked—gods, he looked like he wanted to come down, like he wanted to hurl himself between us and tear the world open with his bare hands. But something held him.
“Put her to sleep,” Kaelith said, pleasant as ever. “Our bride looks tired.”
Malachi stepped in, shadows tightening as he moved. He smelled of leather, steel, and the faintest trace of the soap from my basin.
“Why?” I asked. The word tore my throat on its way out. “Why are you doing this?”
He looked at me then. The furnace gold in his irises didn’t dim, but something under it flickered—pain, or memory, or a signal too small for anyone else to see. His thumb brushed over the thin scar across his palm.
“You’re the end,” he said, and his voice was a general’s now. It carried over the crowd with the terrible weight of inevitability. “And the beginning. Sleep, little dove.”
The last thing I saw was Hayat forcing himself to his feet, rage bright as a fresh wound—and Aeryn screaming my name as Gabriel seized him, both of them swallowed by shadow that left nothing behind.
Somewhere behind the dark, bells rang—one true, one cracked. Water struck stone. Leaves whispered. A match struck and went out. Voices threaded over each other: mine, and hold, and hush. The first was Kaelith’s. The second might have been Malachi’s. The third belonged to no one at all.
And through it, faint as a feather, a single promise I couldn’t catch enough to name.
Something shifted beneath the dark. Something ancient remembering my name.
It brushed the edge of me, and for the first time since the ceremony, the pain didn’t feel like ending—it felt like turning.
The dark exhaled, “Come, child.”
And I followed.